Page 3 of Almost Midnight

When he didn’t feel the need for it, he let the question hang in the air.

He let it be their hypothetical, with no need to pretend there’d ever be an answer.

Dalejem was more than a little gray now. Most of his dark hair had turned an iron gray over the past sixty or so years, and Nick found that hot as fuck, but it also worried him. It started off as a few sprinkled strands, maybe eighty years ago, then gradual salt and pepper, but it had been decades now since Nick could pretend either of those descriptions were still true.

Jem was entirely gray now, his whole head of hair.

His body had thickened some, which was somehow stranger.

Nick tried not to notice.

He knew Dalejem knew hedidnotice, but Nick did his best not to let his mate feel his fear, or the worry that consumed him when he noticed his mate’s hearing getting a little worse, his eyesight a little less than the eagle’s vision he’d had, even a few decades earlier.

Nick did a lot of the shooting now, which should have been proof enough of the changes. No one had ever shot so well as Jem in his prime, not even a vampire, with a vampire’s sight and reflexes and speed. Jem had been terrifyingly good with a gun.

But nothing lasted forever, not even Jem’s unbelievable skill in so many things.

They’d been here for over almost two hundred years.

It was strange to think of.

It felt greedy to fear the end of it, especially when Nick had been gifted such a perfect life, and so much more of it than any human could ever dream of living.

Hedidfear it, though.

He feared that end so badly he could scarcely think past it when he really let it envelope him. It stared him in the face some nights, as much as he tried to deny it; there was only one way this journey could and would end.

And it would inevitably end.

That would happen whether Nick liked it or not, whether he could handle it or not, whether he lied to himself about its coming or not.

The laws of life and death were ironclad.

Time was inexorable.

Nick knew that, but he couldn’t pretend to accept it.

He feared that train barreling towards them so much, he would wander around the countryside sometimes, late at night while his mate slept. Nick would surf in the waves, with the board he’d made with his own two hands, which he hid at night to avoid making the locals too curious about what he might be doing with it.

The idea of his immortality had never weighed on him until his mate began to age.

Before, their long lives had merely posed a logistical problem.

They’d had to move a number of times over the years, of course.

They’d moved because Nick didn’t age, and Jem didn’t age fast enough.

In the beginning they’d moved because they got restless and wanted something new, or simply because they decided it was time, but now their moves were largely strategic.

They always stuck to the coast, though.

Nick liked the ocean, and Dalejem liked it, too, so they moved all up and down theCote d’Azur,and watched it change gradually over those two centuries. They watched the ships come and go. They read the newspapers, once they had some to read, and avoided the rougher parts of humanity where they could, everything from bodies piled high from plague, to wars, to peasant revolts and religious mobs, to famines and crusades.

Most days, Nick barely remembered the life he’d had before now.

It felt like a dream, like something scarcely real.

Other days, it felt so clear, so immediate and alive, he’d hear a laugh that sounded like his mother, or Black, or Miri, or one of his sisters and it was like a punch to the chest. He’d turn around and around, searching for the source, searching for that member of his family, even knowing how irrational it was.

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